Queen & Country

Dir: John Boorman

2014

***

When I heard that John Boorman was going to make a sequel to his 1987 modern classic Hope and Glory I was thrilled. I’m generally against sequels but this film made sense to me, as it was auto-biographical and Boorman himself was back to direct. I thought it would be brilliant having the original cast back as well but alas, only David Hayman returned as Billy’s father as he mysteriously hadn’t aged in twenty-six years. It would have been wonderful to have seen the rest of the cast but then the film should have been made in the early 90s. Still, I had no complaints about the cast, indeed it features some greats, such as David Thewlis and Richard E. Grant. However, it just isn’t quite the same as the original. I first saw Hope and Glory in the late 80s around the same time as I read The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole and a whole new world of humour was opened up to me (before then all the humour I knew was Russ Abbott, the Carry On films and my funny uncle who once told me underpants grew on trees whom I believed for many years). I would liken Queen and Country to Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years, the fifth in Sue Townsend’s series that had all the same characters that I knew and loved, but wasn’t quite the same. The film starts in the early to mid-1950s where Bill (played by Callum Turner) is now 18 and receives his call-up papers for national service. Reporting to the army training camp, he quickly makes friends with fellow-conscript Percy (Caleb Landry Jones). Though most of their intake are sent off to fight in the Korean War, he and Percy are made sergeants and spend their days teaching typing. The bane of their life is Sergeant-Major Bradley (David Thewlis), a decorated veteran of World War II who is obsessive about doing things by the book. An ally against Bradley is the orderly Redmond (Pat Shortt), who teaches them the military arts of "skiving". However, Bradley succeeds in getting Bill charged with subverting a private's will to fight by telling him some truths about Korea. The case is thrown out when Bill shows that all he said had been printed in The Times newspaper. Outside the camp, both friends explore what the town offers by way of women. Bill falls for a beautiful but depressive upper-class girl he calls Ophelia (Tamsin Egerton), while Percy is smitten by a bubbly student nurse called Sophie (Aimee-Ffion Edwards). On leave for the Queen’s coronation, Percy steals a car to join Bill, who is with his family on the Island. Both are delighted to find Bill's renegade sister Dawn (Vanessa Kirby), who has returned from Canada, and Dawn is soon charming Percy. Ophelia makes a brief visit but has to dash back into London. On the television, the family spot her in Westminster Abbey as one of the nobility, something which Bill did not know. Back in camp, Bill gets word that Ophelia is again in hospital with mental problems and, when he visits her, she rejects him brutally. Shocked and in tears, he is found by Sophie, who leads him to an empty room and takes his virginity. Percy then confides that he lost his to his sister Dawn. Percy however is finding military life a strain and with Redmond concocts an absurd scheme to steal the mess clock, a gift from Queen Victoria. An investigation pinpoints his guilt, upon which Redmond betrays him. A court martial sentences him to military prison and Bill is allowed to escort him there in handcuffs. Dawn jumps on the train and says she will wait for him. Bill then goes to visit Bradley, who has cracked under the strain of Percy's persecution and is in a military hospital on mental grounds, but Bradley rejects him brutally. In a ward he sees the private he allegedly dissuaded from fighting in Korea, who has lost a foot there. The film ends back on the Island where his family live, where Sophie is in the river acting while Bill with a new film camera is filming her. Leaving the camera running, he jumps in to embrace her. It’s a personal end that signifies Boorman’s transition into film and a future with his wife, although its not 100% true to life. It’s a very different sort of film from Hope and Glory, just as our lives a different from one decade to the next but I don’t feel the humour was quite as strong. The films should have felt ten years apart but you could see every single twenty-eight year that it took to make. It was a little too glossy for me and all of the warmth of the first film was lost. I do wonder whether it is of regret to Boorman that he hadn’t made the follow up sooner and with as much of the original cast as he could. Expectations were perhaps a little too high with all things considered so the anti-climax hit a little harder than it should have. I really enjoyed it and there isn’t anything to fault it on, other than perhaps Caleb Landry Jones’ strange accent. It just doesn’t feel like a continuation of the same story and nor do the characters feel the same. The first film is a modern classic but the second film feels like a above average made-for-TV film, like I said, its good, but it just doesn’t have the same magic as the original.